After you come to the realization that this master loves you and takes care of you and provides for you, that He has been doing it all along, that He deserves every kind of appreciation for it, there is one more thing you have to admit. 

You have to acknowledge that He is the master. 

Which makes you the slave. 

He has not talked about you being the slave yet. He has not used that word on you. He just said rabb.¹ 

So let me take you to the philosophical side of it, because I want to look at the second half of that phrase. What does rabb al-alameen (رَبِّ ٱلۡعَٰلَمِينَ) mean? What are the benefits of it? 

Alameen in Arabic, for our purposes here, you can think of as nations. In the Quran’s own usage the word is used many times over for nations, for different peoples. 

So look at what you have just conceded. 

If One Nation Has Injustice, Every Nation Has Injustice 

You have conceded that the plight of humanity is not the plight of one nation. 

The plight of humanity is the plight of all nations. If one nation has injustice, every nation has injustice. If one nation has corruption, every nation has corruption. 

If I have concluded that He is a master, He is not just my master. He is master to all nations. 

Imagine all of you are students in the same institution. What does that make you to each other? What ranking do you have among yourselves? 

You are classmates. Which means you are equal. 

If He is the master and all nations are His slave, then all nations are what? Equal. 

You have just taken your first step toward justice. You cannot talk about justice at all until you have acknowledged that all human beings are equal and should be treated equally. If we all have the same one master, then all of us are slaves, which means all of us are equal in front of Allah. 

That is all that matters. 

Now Let Me Take You to the Other Side 

One of the most common problems for a person who has trouble believing in God is injustice. 

Here is the conclusion you eventually reach about life in this world. If one person kills innocent people, what is the most you can do to him? How many times are you going to kill him? 

A man killed a hundred people. I want justice. 

I want justice and all I can do is kill him once. 

Maybe he is a loner. No parents alive, no children, nobody who will miss him when you kill him. But the hundred people he killed, some of them were fathers. Some were daughters. Some were mothers, some were sisters, some were teachers. They were people who meant something to other people. 

So the loss he created was not only the loss of those lives. It was the loss carried by everyone who loved them and the harm he did to a whole society. 

Which means one life is not even equal to one life once you look at the harm caused. Even if he had taken only one life, taking his life is not justice. It does not repair the damage that goes beyond the life, does it?

There Is No Such Thing as Perfect Justice 

You know what conclusion you come to if you actually think about this? 

There is no justice system. 

You will say, hey Ustadh, what about the Sharia? 

Yep. Sharia included. 

The Prophet ﷺ himself. People came to him presenting a case. 

One man presents his case and he is very well spoken. The other man says, look, I do not speak that well. I have a case too, but I got nervous and I cannot talk. 

So what does he say? I can only make a judgment based on the evidences presented to me. Allah will judge between the two of you in the akhirah. 

So what is he telling us? 

Law and Justice Are Not the Same Thing 

Law itself is not the same as justice. 

The laws have to be fair. The people doing the judging on top of that have to be fair. The people going to trial also have to be fair, for anything even close to justice to happen. 

If any one of those is missing, if the people presenting the evidence are unfair and they present false evidence, then even if the judge is fair and the law is fair, will you still get an unfair judgment? 

Absolutely you will. You are not going to get justice. 

The law was served. Justice was not served. 

What we learn from this is that there is never going to be a society anywhere in the world that has perfect justice. If we are waiting for that to happen, good luck with that. It does not exist. 

That is a pretty depressing thing to internalize, because reconciling it with faith in God can be challenging. On the one hand I believe in a God who is perfect in every single way and the one thing I can never reconcile is all of this. All this injustice. 

Except that there is only one reconciliation. There is only one and there is no other. 

He Did Not Design a Snowflake and Leave the World in Chaos 

If He is fair and I believe Him to be fair, then something has to happen. 

Think about what justice actually means. If I was paid less than I deserved, I should get the full payment. If I took more than my share, I should have to give the rest of it back. If I hurt someone, they should be compensated and I should be punished. 

Every debit should be credited. Every credit should be debited. Everything should be balanced out at the end. 

That is what justice is. I have already argued that here it is impossible. 

So there has to be an accounting. 

I cannot believe in a God who did all of this, down to a little snowflake, all of it in symmetrical order, all of it in design, a God who created this planet with such overwhelming beauty, then left this world to chaos. 

He created too much order around me for me to believe He would leave anything in chaos. So the chaos in this world has to be undone. There has to be some sort of accounting. Something has to be there. 

That something should be marked by justice. 

Now what is the next ayah? 

مَٰلِكِ يَوۡمِ ٱلدِّينِ

Maliki yawm ad-din²

On the one hand He is the One who created with love and mercy and care. He is rabb and a rabb cares. But part of being a rabb is that you also have to be just. 

Otherwise I have a hard time believing in it. 

I am trying to introduce a thought process to you. We believe in a master who will deliver justice and who will also deliver what?

ٱلرَّحۡمَٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

Ar-Rahman, Ar-Raheem³

Love and mercy and justice. It is a combination of both of those things. 

Can I Take Five Extra Minutes? Four Problems of Balance 

Five extra minutes. I promise. 

Four problems. Please remember these four problems. The four problems of balance. 

By the way, every society that talks about justice, every courthouse, what is the image of justice? A balance scale. 

Problem one. Striking the balance between man and woman. 

Problem two. Striking the balance between the boss and the employee. The people with money and the people who need money. The technical term, if you want to sound super smart, is capital versus labor. 

Problem three. Government versus people. 

Problem four. Body versus soul. 

Four problems. Humanity has had these four problems from day one. Adam (AS) was told that some of you will be enemy to others.⁴ 

Now imagine for a moment that there is a fight between a husband and a wife so bad that they are ready to get divorced and they file. I do not know both sides of the story. 

The judge in that courtroom is a woman who recently went through a divorce herself. Who is not having a good day. 

That husband. You understand? She cannot help being a woman. She cannot help being who she is. If it is a guy who just went through a nasty divorce, that lady is not going to have a good day in his court. 

Is it not the case that every arbiter, every judge, is going to be either a man or a woman? Which means they are going to have a very hard time thinking from the perspective of the other one. 

Capital and Labor, Government and People, Body and Soul 

Second problem. The boss wants more hours, less pay, no vacation. The employee wants fewer hours, more pay, more vacation. 

They want the exact opposite thing. 

If you give all the power to labor, the economy is gone. If you give all the power to the boss, corruption comes in and the economy is gone. 

You have to find some kind of balance. Have you found that balance yet? 

Nope. 

We do not have the balance between men and women, because at the end of the day who are you going to let decide? Either a man or a woman. So the struggle remains. 

Third problem. Government wants more tax, more control, fewer freedoms. What do people want? Less tax, less control, more freedoms. 

It is constant conflict. 

Have we figured out a way to balance government and people anywhere in the world? 

Fourth problem. Body and soul. There are people who are so concerned about the soul that they end up denying the rights of the body. There are people who concern themselves entirely with the body, with physical health, mental health, nutrition, working out, all of it and end up denying the rights of the soul. So the soul gets violated. 

How do we find the balance? Because you cannot find justice if you do not have balance. 

If Only There Was a Straight Line 

If only there was a straight line that ran right through all of them. 

Someone who cares about men exactly as much as He cares about women. Someone who cares about capital as much as He cares about labor. Someone who cares about government as much as He cares about people. Someone who cares about your body as much as He cares about your soul. 

Because He is equally involved in both of them and equally loves both of them, because He is rabb al-alameen (رَبِّ ٱلۡعَٰلَمِينَ) and He can take a neutral approach to all of it. 

Can a human being do that? 

That is Ihdina as-sirat al-mustaqim (ٱهۡدِنَا ٱلصِّرَٰطَ ٱلۡمُسۡتَقِيمَ).⁵ 

Guide us to the straight path. The path that is not this way and not that way. Find us the balance between all of our conflicts. 

That is what the Quran does. It is supposed to be the way in the middle. 

Now when you say, I do not want guidance, I do not want this religious guidance, we can figure this out for ourselves. Go ahead. 

You will never have a straight path. You will have something that changes, then changes again, then changes again, then changes again. Your standards for what is just and what is fair will keep switching year after year after year. Your standards will never sit still in the same place, because you do not want guidance from above that looks at both sides equally. 

That is Ihdina as-sirat al-mustaqim (ٱهۡدِنَا ٱلصِّرَٰطَ ٱلۡمُسۡتَقِيمَ). 

That is the view of the Quran. 

This session reads Al-Fatihah as a philosophical argument. Study The Quran’s Philosophy with Ustadh Nouman Ali Khan on Bayyinah TV: Bayyinah TV 

Notes 

This post is adapted from session four of The Quran’s Philosophy on Bayyinah TV and is written in the voice of that session. Every teaching claim, example and aside in it is taken from the session itself.

[1] Quran, 1:2, https://quran.com/1/2 ↩

[2] Quran, 1:4, https://quran.com/1/4 ↩

[3] Quran, 1:3, https://quran.com/1/3 ↩

[4] Quran, 2:36, https://quran.com/2/36 ↩

[5] Quran, 1:6, https://quran.com/1/6 ↩